CodePen

Shaw and Chris are on the show to talk about the thinking and challenges behind upgrading these rather important bits of technology in our stack. We definitely think of React version upgrades and Next.js version upgrades as different things. Sometimes they are prerequisites. The Next.js ones are a b... read more

We’re definitely in an era where “AI Browsers” have become a whole category. ChatGPT Atlas is the latest drop. Like so many others so far, it’s got a built-in sidebar for AI chat (whoop-de-do). The “agentic” mode is much more interesting, weird sparkle overlay and all. You can tell it to do somethin... read more

Robert and Chris hop on the show to talk about choices we’ve had to make around Babel. Probably the best way to use Babel is to just use the @babel/preset-env plugin so you get modern JavaScript features processed down to a level of browser support you find comfortable. But Babel supports all sorts ... read more

Rachel and Chris jump on the show to talk about a bit of client-side technology we use: Apollo. We use it because we have a GraphQL API and Apollo helps us write queries and mutations that go through that API. It slots in quite nicely with our React front-end, providing hooks we use to do […]... read more

If you’re a CodePen user, this shouldn’t affect you aside from potentially seeing some console noise while we work this out. Carry on! At CodePen we have Embedded Pens which are shown in an <iframe>. These contain user-authored code served from a non-same-origin URL. We like to be both safe an... read more

We get all excited when we get new CSS features. Well, I do anyway. It’s amazing, because sometimes it unlocks something we’ve literally never been able to do before. It’s wonderful when an artist finishes a new painting, and something to be celebrated. But this is more akin to a new color dropping,... read more

We’re over 13 years old as a company now. We decide that we’re not a startup anymore (we’re a “small business” with big dreams) but we are still indie. We’ve seen trends come and go. We just do what we do, knowing the tradeoffs, and plan to keep getting better as long as we can. […]... read more

Damning opening words from Edwin Heathcote in Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Every single thing on Earth not produced by nature had been designed. That was the spiel. Design wanted it all. Now Earth is a mess, its climate warming rapidly, its seas full of waste. There ar... read more

Or just “Embeds” as we more frequently refer to them as. Stephen and Chris talk about the fairly meaty project which was re-writing our Embeds for a CodePen 2.0 world. No longer can we assume Pens are just one HTML, CSS, and JavaScript “file”, so they needed a bit of a redesign, but doing as […]... read more

Nothing is above a little healthy criticism. Here’s Den Odell’s article We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem. It’s easy to forget what CSS was originally designed for: documents. You’d write some HTML, style a few headings and paragraphs, maybe float an image to the left, and c... read more